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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26777083">Dear Fellow Traveler</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re'>lagardère (laurore)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Urban Exploration, or the guy whose idea of a hot date is a trip to the sewers, the guy who shows up in designer clothes to explore an abandoned factory, where thomas jopson's options are</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 04:36:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>15,201</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26777083</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>What if they were still explorers, of a sort?</i>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Thomas Jopson/Lt Edward Little</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The Joplittle Fall Fic Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. the church</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/ktula/gifts">ktula</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For the prompt “a niche modern au of your choosing”, which is just about the best prompt i could have been given, thank you. I hope you’ll like it &lt;3</p><p>(I started writing this, realised it would not be an easy month at work, and considered shelving the whole thing in favour of something simpler, so shout-out to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterlain/pseuds/winterlain">winterlain</a> for some extremelyEXTREMELY patient hand-holding. Additional gratitude to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/austrechild">austrechild</a> for beta work, and to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAntlers/pseuds/MissAntlers">MissAntlers</a> for reading this through and letting me ramble about whatever urbex-related article I'd last read.)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The rendez-vous point is a bus ride away from Thomas' flat in the town centre, but quite close to the house where his grandparents used to live. The sun hasn’t quite set by the time he gets off the bus and walks along houses where the paint is peeling off the facades like bark off a birch tree, charity shops that have barely updated their windows since the 80s, and brand new coffee shops with quirky signs, colourful tables and chairs on the pavement waiting for the neighbourhood to become properly gentrified. Thomas had come to visit his grandparents on a number of occasions as a child. The steelworks had just closed down at the time, and a lot of the houses were boarded up. Back then, he used to think it meant that their owners had died, rather than moved away. As if the houses were all in mourning - and there were so many of them in those few streets where he was allowed to wander on his own.</p><p>Tom goes by <em>Icemaster</em> online ("I came up with that name when I was twelve and lurking on gaming forums," he’d said, apologetic, the first time they met. "You should just call me Tom.") They are about the same age, which is about the extent of the personal details Thomas knows about the man. They have each other’s numbers by now and will set up meetings online and then by text. </p><p>This time around, Tom had left it to him to decide when they should meet. In the evening right after sundown, or in the morning, right before the sunrise. Over the years, Thomas has come to understand that there’s really two kinds of people, those who prefer the coming of night and those who favour its vanishing, and it’s likely which side you fall on says something about you. Tom is one for the sunrise, likes to run away from whatever they’ve been exploring to let the daylight engulf him (“We’ve surfaced,” he’d said once, as they came out of an abandoned cinema, blinking in the sun, as if they’d spent the past hour in a cave). Thomas prefers the evenings, but for rather practical reasons: he has to be at the café at 7 to get it ready for its opening time at 8.30. Exploring early in the night, he can hope to catch a few hours of sleep before he goes to work. </p><p>Maybe this distinction is reductive. Some will only head out under cover of night. He’d known this one girl who only went exploring in broad daylight and had turned it into a political statement (“Trespassing is only a criminal offense if you’re causing a disruption. What am I disrupting? The spiders? The ingrained idea that land can be privately owned?”). In Thomas’ experience, it’s safer to go exploring when there’s little enough light that you won’t easily be seen; yet enough light that you can make out your surroundings and pinpoint possible reasons to abort the outing: other people onsite, seccas, a brand new alarm system. A guy in Wales had recently reported being chased out of an old reservoir by a pack of wild dogs.</p><p>Tom is waiting for him at the corner of the street, his fair hair hidden under a dark beanie, wearing the familiar uniform of a dark hoodie and jeans and boots, his backpack slung over his shoulder.</p><p>“The others are waiting for us there, but I wanted a chance to catch up with you. I haven’t seen you since… what was it? All Souls Church?”</p><p>“The cistern,” Thomas corrects him, as they set off at a brisk pace, Thomas matching Tom’s long strides. “The one we couldn’t get into.”</p><p>“Right… But we did get to see the ice breaking along the river on the way back. I think maybe that was better than the cistern would have been. It looked like someone had smashed glass. And the sound…”</p><p>“It was eerie.”</p><p>“How have you been?”</p><p>Thomas shrugs and smiles to offset his unwillingness to answer.</p><p>“I’m alright.”</p><p>Tom’s look is all too knowing. </p><p>“It’s a solitary town, isn’t it? I think that sometimes.”</p><p><em> What does it say, </em> Thomas thinks, <em> that you’re about the closest thing to a friend I’ve got, and I don’t even know your full name, or what you do for a living? </em>He doesn’t dare voice the thought, worried it might come across as self-pitying, although he doesn’t mean it that way, not exactly.</p><p>“There they are,” Tom whispers to him, as he ducks sideways through a broken gate, and towards where the other two are waiting, sitting against the low stone wall marking the edge of the property.</p><p>The woman Thomas knows from the same forum where he’d met Tom some three or four years ago, although he’d never seen her in real life.</p><p>“Silence,” she introduces herself, hand extended. She’s got a steady, no-nonsense air about her, the sort of person you’d trust out of instinct ahead of experience.</p><p>“It’s good to finally meet you,” Thomas says. “And you must be the Lieutenant,” he adds, turning to the other man, glancing disapprovingly at his cigarette. </p><p>As far as there are rules in this kind of venture, the first is that you don’t take unnecessary risks, the second, that you shouldn’t leave anything behind. Cigarettes contravene both those rules.</p><p>“It’s his first time,” Tom says, clapping the Lieutenant on the back. “Be gentle with him.”</p><p>Thomas gives him a look - that’s another rule, no first-timers, no one who hasn’t done this before, who hasn’t been extensively vetted by either themselves or someone they trust - but Tom just grins at him and moves on towards the side of the building, and there’s little to do but follow. Tom watches as the Lieutenant - dark hair, slender build, boots that have at least seen some amount of wear, splattered with paint, coated in white dust - picks his way through the overgrown front yard, careful for the bits of splintered wood and broken glass. </p><p>Tom has the key for the rusty padlock on the side door - he often does. The one time Thomas had asked him about it, Tom had shrugged and smiled. "I asked the right person," he’d said. Thomas figures if he were the owner of a building in disrepair, the one person he’d trust to take a look at it without disturbing anything would probably be Tom. On a local level, their community of explorers isn’t a big one, and he knows him and Tom have garnered a reputation for being overly cautious, but he trusts Tom’s instincts. Tom once got him to the top of a church spire in time for sunrise; he also had the presence of mind to call off a visit to a quarry on the night of a storm, and the man who’d gone in spite of his warnings had turned up dead the next morning. The accident had served as an acute reminder. This thing that they love doing, their - passion? Pastime? Hobby? Thomas has heard one guy calling it a profession, "Because we’re professing something, a love of the unknown, the no-longer-known, the forgotten, the ruined, we are doing a vital public service, reclaiming places and their memories, making them endure" - it’s not danger-free.</p><p>Thomas watches the newcomer as they step inside the church. Upon reaching the side aisle he seems to sense Thomas’ eyes on him and turns back, his pale face lit red and green and blue from the stained glass windows. Thomas swallows. There’s something about the scene - the hieratic figures in the windows, the coloured panes of glass with their thick black outline, and the Lieutenant’s straight-backed posture, his sad dark eyes. The knight in the window, wearing a mosaic of large silver glass squares for an armour, has nothing on the man’s solemn bearing.</p><p>“Do you know it?” the Lieutenant asks, pointing at the window.</p><p>“St George?” Thomas says as he comes to join him. He nods towards the red figure contorting itself at the Lieutenant’s feet. “There’s a dragon.”</p><p>“I meant the technique.”</p><p>Tom and Silence have moved towards the centre of the room, where the concrete altar still stands right under the domed roof. Thomas should be taking pictures by now, they won’t stay long and this is the only way for him to order his thoughts about these visits, the pictures and the hours he later spends editing and archiving them. Yet he decides to humour the man, stepping closer to the knight in armour.</p><p>“It’s called <em>dalle de verre</em>,” the Lieutenant explains. “The glass is a lot thicker than an ordinary stained glass window, see? The frame…” He touches the black line around a red square. “It’s concrete, not lead. The modernist answer to the gothic’s stained glass windows. They invented this technique in the 20s. I’ve always thought it was underappreciated. For a while people thought there was something crude about it, but it’s expressive, isn’t it? It says something and it says it more directly… with more power, maybe… than a more detailed artwork. That’s why I wanted to come here.” He looks down the side aisle, at the row of windows where a deep blue dominates, as if all the figures were immersed in water. “Not for the building, really. For the windows.”</p><p>He starts slightly when Thomas takes a picture.</p><p>“Sorry,” Thomas says. “It does seem like the sort of thing worth catching on film.”</p><p>“There’s a piano!” Tom calls from the other side of the choir, following this with a single, haunting note. </p><p>The church is just as it was when its congregation last visited: rows of wooden pews, a white cloth covering the altar, music sheets on a fairly recent piano. Once they’ve wandered around - opening cupboards in the vestry, standing beneath the dome, the sky showing through the holes in its covering, blue turning to steely grey with nightfall, the sounds of the city intruding upon them, passing cars on the nearby road - they gather back in the choir for a last look at the place. Not for the first time, Thomas wishes he could take more away with him. One of those windows, maybe. Less out of some materialistic desire than because he knows pictures never do justice to a place or a moment. They’re only the basic frame upon which you project your memories, and who’s to say he’ll remember this place accurately, the way it made him feel, like maybe beauty isn’t such a foreign concept but something he can touch, something he can gaze at from up close, palm flat against a little square that vibrates with light?</p><p>“It was a good one,” Silence tells Tom when they leave through the same side door they used on the way in, Tom putting the padlock back in place. The Lieutenant has wandered off into the nearby cemetery, which seems far older than the church, the graves eaten up by moss, surrounded by tall weeds.</p><p>“There’s talk it might get torn down,” Tom says. “I thought it’d be worth a look before they do. When it closed down I was four, five years old? I just remembered that dome. The light coming down through it. Anyone of you need a ride home? Or a drink? The night’s still young.”</p><p>Silence and the Lieutenant beg off, though Silence tells Tom to warn her a few days ahead of the demolition so she might come back and “paint something, somewhere.”</p><p>“Have you ever seen her art?” Tom asks Thomas when it’s only the two of them at the pub with a couple of beers, Thomas’ camera on the table, Tom ruffling his blonde hair. As often at the end of a visit, he seems lost in his own head.</p><p>“Street art, yeah?” </p><p>Tom nods. “It’s never meant to last, though. She just shows up in a building a day or two before they tear it down, sprays a forest on the walls of a bedroom, or a portrait, or a polar bear sitting on an ice floe. She’ll make it look like the torn wallpaper and the cracks in the wall are part of the picture. She’s very good, the lady Silence.”</p><p>“Do you think she’d let me take a picture, next time she does it?”</p><p>“I doubt it,” Tom smiles. “She’d lecture you, more like. About how everything has got to end and we just have to accept it. What about the Lieutenant, what’s your read on the guy?”</p><p>“A bit hung-up?” Thomas ventures.</p><p>“Why do you think he does this? He came highly recommended to me. We have a mutual friend. But he doesn’t seem like the type. He’s not an explorer... I don’t think he has a taste for ruins, or a political agenda. So what’s his deal?”</p><p>Thomas will think of that question later, as he looks at the first picture he’d taken at the abandoned church - not just the <em> dalle de verre </em> but the Lieutenant standing close to it, face bathed in coloured light, looking not like a knight or a churchgoer but like one of those people Thomas sees sometimes when he goes clubbing, their skin aglow with neon light, their eyes shadowed and their mouths pale. People looking for a fix, whether its drugs or sex or liquor or a few seconds of human contact. People who spend hours in a crowd looking for someone, shouting a name until they realise it’s their own, that they only came here in the first place because they were looking for themselves.</p><p>“I think you’re wrong,” he tells Tom. “I think he’s no less an explorer than we are.” </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. the smelting plant</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“How are you doing?” Thomas asks once the cafe is ready to open, the chairs off the tables and the chalkboard set up outside, Diggle’s cakes and sandwiches arranged under the counter, two steaming mugs of coffee placed before them: the world’s most diluted Americano for Armitage, a latte for Thomas.</p><p>Armitage gives him a look that could either be described as uninterested or downright rude and returns to his coffee. Thomas tries not to take it personally. It’s not like the two of them have ever got along, not since Thomas showed up that first day to discover they had the same first name and the owner had decided to resolve the situation by calling him “Able Thomas” and Armitage “Lesser Thomas”, because Thomas had made him a better macchiato.</p><p>After that they’d gone by their last names, the two of them but also John Diggle the cook, out of solidarity, and the owner they rarely see anymore, now that he’s shacking up with the lady from the interior design shop across the street. Nevertheless, the damage is done. Armitage rarely gives Thomas the time of day. There’s something profoundly childish about it, to the point where Thomas sometimes wishes he could just crack that fine varnish of irreproachable manners his mother spent years laying on him, coat after coat of principles he can’t seem to shake, and punch Armitage in the face. And then maybe they’d start getting along.</p><p>The only time Armitage displays anything but acute boredom is when - Thomas glances at the clock, three, two, one, and right on time the glass door jingles - his boyfriend comes by to grab coffee before work.</p><p>“Thomas,” Solomon says, nodding towards Thomas. “Tommy,” with a quick smile at Armitage. “Get me whatever, I can’t stay long. The architect wants us on site in half an hour, apparently he’s not too happy with the way the crew’s been handling the bricklaying. If he thinks I’m just gonna lie down and take his nonsense reproaches, he’s got a surprise coming his way…”</p><p>The rhythm of it is familiar, Solomon’s grousing, the smell of coffee, the lassitude of the long day ahead balanced against the expectation of an expedition in the evening, the street outside waking up, shops disgorging their wares on the pavement, topiaries and cacti at the plant shop, postcard displays at the stationery shop, a sign in front of the cafe across the street reading, <em> Have You Tried Our Carrot Cake? It’s Better Than The One Across The Street, </em>because the owner used to have a rather nasty rivalry going on with Diggle, until they figured out that signs like these got them both an influx of customers, after which they’d continued with the heckling, but buried the hatchet.</p><p>“I was putting up walls when he was still in his fancy design school, but I guess that’s the only thing they teach them there, to think they’re better than everyone else…”</p><p>“What are you working on?” Thomas asks as he sips his coffee.</p><p>“Some old abattoirs. Project is to turn them into some sort of coworking space. With a restaurant in the middle. It’s a terrible idea if you ask me but I’m not the one getting paid to draw the place…”</p><p>“I’ve been there,” Thomas says. “A while back.” When the place was still closed down, hooks hanging from the ceilings, light pouring in from the tall windows, the dust tinted gold. Tom knew someone who knew someone who’d worked there back in the day. Aside from the hooks, the place had been stripped clean, like it had already become something else. “I’d be curious to see what they do with it. There’s that big nave like a plane shed, or a church.”</p><p>“I’d like to see that,” Armitage says, unexpectedly. He returns to staring at his coffee as if he regrets having spoken.</p><p>“I could take you guys on a tour, sure,” Solomon shrugs. “Okay, that’s my cue. Cigarette and I’m on my way.”</p><p>Armitage steps out to join him, glancing at Thomas as if daring him to say something about it. Thomas watches them for a while as they smoke out front of the cafe, Solomon who’s built like a boxer, strong but light on his feet, half sitting on one of the cafe’s little ironwork tables that seems liable to break under his weight; Armitage with that black apron tied tightly around his narrow waist, his black curls already messed up by the steam from the coffee machine. Most of the time, Thomas reflects, you don’t get to choose who you spend your day with, coworkers and patrons and neighbours, people who might fit inside your life to some extent, but who’ll never be exactly the people you need - the people you’d be fully at ease with.</p><p>If that’s going to be the case, the least he can do is decide who he spends his nights with.</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He’d told the Lieutenant to meet him inside the property, "Scale the gate and you’re in, nothing too daunting I promise," and once he’s dropped down on the other side of the front gate, he spots the red tip of the Lieutenant’s cigarette among the shadows on the edge of the factory owner’s house.</p><p>Thomas raises his torch towards the circular front of the building, the glass doors and windows leading into a vast empty room filled with dust and rubble. The doors are open, some of the windows broken. The ground is covered with mouse droppings. When the beam of Thomas’ torch glances upon a cornice it startles two small bats that veer off in wild circles.</p><p>“They must have entertained people here,” the Lieutenant remarks. “Parties, balls. It used to be the largest factory for miles around.”</p><p>“Guests of the factory owner,” Thomas remarks. “Not workers. Isn’t it the irony of houses like this one? Close to the factory building so the owner could keep an eye on the workers at all times; but with an irreducible distance between the two… They’d have heard the music in the evenings, those who hadn’t gone home yet. They would see the light spilling into the yard. I’m not sure this building is the most interesting... Shall we?”</p><p>On its other side, facing the yard and the assortment of tall factory buildings, corrugated iron and concrete, the factory owner’s house is overgrown, vines crawling across the facade, pushing their way through the faintest crack in the shutters and hanging down from the window sills, the weeds pushing the doors apart so that it looks as if the house is disgorging plants.</p><p>“Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” the Lieutenant muses. “The curse for all those revels… Should we go inside, wake them up?”</p><p>Thomas shudders.</p><p>“Let them sleep,” he says, and this time the torch light falls upon the Lieutenant’s face, setting him apart from the surrounding shadows, a handsome assortment of shadows himself, with those dark eyes, the heavy brows, that mouth that can’t quite decide if it wants to smile or not.</p><p>“I wasn’t expecting this invitation,” the Lieutenant says. “Didn’t think I’d made much of an impression the last time around, at least, not a very good one.”</p><p>“You had a good understanding of the place,” Thomas says, because he can’t exactly say, <em> There’s something arresting about you, and that’s what I look for, always, on these outings. Arresting sights. </em></p><p>“I’m glad you did, though. Ask me. I was wondering if you could send me some of the pictures you… There’s a light. Over there. I saw something.”</p><p>Thomas switches off his torch and peers in the darkness in the direction the Lieutenant had pointed out, towards the old plant. </p><p>“I don’t…”</p><p>“There!” the Lieutenant exclaims, and suddenly Thomas can see it, the beam of a torch bouncing up and down, lighting in turn the grass and the tall sliding doors along the front of the plant.</p><p>“Secca, you think?” he whispers.</p><p>“I don’t think there’s supposed to be any security here,” the Lieutenant answers, keeping his voice just as low. “Should we abort?”</p><p>Thomas is about to reply that yes, this seems like a sound idea, when a voice rises from the direction of the mysterious flashlight.</p><p>“Mary?”</p><p>“I know who that is,” Thomas says, and hesitates a handful of seconds before he decides, “Come on.”</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The last time Thomas saw Cornelius, they’d been exploring a storm drain. As far as Cornelius has a specialty, it tends to be underground spaces, or at any rate, closed and cramped spaces with little light to guide oneself by. While he goes by Cornelius online, Thomas had suspected early on that his real name must be something else, since it took him a while to get used to answering to that. Insofar as they have a milieu (Tom would argue they don’t, that they’re too varied a group of individuals to have any kind of socio-economic consistency), it’s common practice within it to hide behind a pseudonym, or several of them. Cornelius has never called Thomas anything but Mary, a diminutive of the pseudonym he’d chosen for himself some eight or nine years ago, back when he'd only just moved here from London: <em> marylebone</em>.</p><p>“I heard about Billy,” Thomas ventures, as they gather in front of one of the sheds. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“Well,” Cornelius says, somewhat flippantly, but he avoids Thomas’ gaze, his mouth contorting in a grimace. “We all know the risks, don’t we?”</p><p>Thomas points his flashlight away from Cornelius and towards the side door Tom suggested they use to get inside the building. There is never going to be a time and place for this conversation. They do know the risks, but in this particular case, Billy had been doubly warned. It requires some mental gymnastics to get around the fact that Tom told him the quarry was unstable in bad weather and that Billy still decided to set off in the biggest storm the town had seen in twenty years.</p><p>“This is Magnus,” Cornelius offers, indicating the guy at his side. “You might have run into each other online, he goes by <em> big_man </em>on there.”</p><p>Magnus is indeed a large man, tall and broad-shouldered, not very keen on speaking it seems, because he only nods vaguely at this introduction. In turn, Thomas introduces the Lieutenant, who’s watched this exchange with cautious curiosity, standing a few steps behind them. </p><p>“It’s quite a coincidence, that we decided to explore the plant the same night,” Thomas remarks.</p><p>“Oh, I heard on the grapevine you’d be here,” Cornelius shrugs. Next to Magnus he seems even smaller than usual, and the torches give his pale skin a sickly tinge, dulling his red hair to a quieter blond. “I’d been meaning to come by for a while, but I figured, why not meet up with Mary? We had a good time last time, didn’t we?”</p><p>“We paddled an inflatable raft in the sewers,” Thomas informs the Lieutenant and Magnus, smiling slightly. “It was just us and the rats down there for an hour or two, until the raft got punctured and we had to wade out with water up to our thighs. If you ever get caught down there though, make sure it’s with Cornelius. He has a good sense of direction.”</p><p>There’ll be time later, he reckons, to take Cornelius aside and discuss the ethics of crashing someone else’s exploration without so much as a forewarning.</p><p>In the meantime, the four of them might as well head on together.</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>They manage to enter most of the buildings, torchlights pointed at the floor to alert each other to the various holes in the ground, rotten floorboards and traps leading down into the bowels of the plant. Early on they agree to remain on ground level due to the lack of light and the alarming state of most of the infrastructure, tiles fallen in and bits of metal sheeting torn off the roofs, the ground littered with pieces of wood and sections of metal pipe, damp cardboard and pages of paper that flutter as they walk. The spiderwebs in the corners are coated so thickly with dust you could lie down on them without falling through. Some machines have been left in place, partially dismembered on warped floorboards that won’t sustain their weight forever. They wander up ladders and along walkways and Thomas takes a picture of Cornelius sitting on an enormous coil of wire three-times his size, mounted on a big wooden spool, the name of the Manchester firm that made it still painted around the side.</p><p>In the foreman’s office, the Lieutenant dusts off a calendar pinned to the wall alongside faded newspaper clippings, uncovering the naked woman illustrating the month of February, her back arched to display her voluminous breasts.</p><p>“They might as well have left yesterday,” he says.</p><p>Outside, Thomas can hear Magnus and Cornelius moving metal around, and in a minute he’ll head out to figure out what they might be doing, but for now he allows himself a few more minutes in the Lieutenant’s company, away from Magnus’ propensity to knock furniture over, from Cornelius’ running commentary on all the places he’s been to, scaling scaffolding to the top of the Shard, crossing bridges along cables hardly wider than his foot, thousands of feet above ground ("It’s all about the freedom of it. You have to long for freedom in your bones. Free passage anywhere. Everywhere. When I was standing on top of that chimney at Battersea, I decided no door would be closed to me, ever").</p><p>“A strange man, this Cornelius,” the Lieutenant notes.</p><p>“He’s resourceful,” Thomas says. It’s about the nicest thing he could think to say in the spur of the moment. “You have to be strange, to do what we do, don’t you? Or at the very least, something of a nonconformist.”</p><p>“If you knew me any better, you wouldn’t say that.” The Lieutenant’s smile is slightly crooked, as if he’s never quite sure whether a situation should be taken seriously or not. “I usually tend towards conformity, regardless of the situation. And really I regret it. I envy your daring, and how you’re able to balance it out with patience and care. You’re a rare sort of man, Thomas.”</p><p>Before Thomas can think what to answer, Cornelius calls out to them from the entrance of the building.</p><p>“Magnus found a spooky warehouse!”</p><p>Outside they jump over the old conveyor belt that runs the length of the factory grounds and follow Cornelius towards a succession of large sheds. Magnus is waiting inside the first, under a network of steel crossbeams, the tall windows dripping with ivy, the ground bare. There is nothing left in here, no machinery or forgotten instructions and reports, no signs warning against deadly electrical shocks. Whenever they speak, their voices bounce off the metal of the roof and walls.</p><p>“You could do incredible things with this space,” Cornelius remarks. “A cinema. Remember that time we set up a screening inside the quarries, Thomas? We could do that here. Bring booze and music. We’d be gone before sunrise, no one would know.”</p><p>“I heard they were going to tear it down,” Magnus says. It’s the first Thomas has heard him speak. He has a deep voice, somewhat uncertain. “City council. They want the whole plant gone.”</p><p>“Well, what are they supposed to do?” Cornelius laughs. “Turn it into a coworking place, like the abattoirs? Somewhere to go get your quinoa salad, or whatever it is that rich slackers like to eat these days.”</p><p>“I don’t think it has to be a bad thing,” Thomas shrugs, looking up at the crisscrossing beams, daylight showing through the plastic sheet covering a hole in the roof. “Flip the place and then turn it. People would come here again. They just won’t see it like we did, but then I guess that’s why we do this, to see these places like nobody else does, before some part of them is gone?”</p><p>Cornelius shakes his head.</p><p>“I don’t do this to record the past, and I don’t think you do either. It’s about crossing boundaries. Don’t you agree, Lieutenant? What about you, what lines did you cross to get here?”</p><p>The Lieutenant only gazes silently at him. Thomas thinks about the way he’d spoken in the office, like he’d been trying to make a confession. Thomas had almost crossed a line then, had been seconds away from asking him his name.</p><p>“You know what I like about underground places?” Cornelius says, seemingly unphased that his previous question went unanswered. “Sometimes you can’t tell if you’re going up or down. If you’re going to end up blinking in the light or buried deeper. This place is fun, but it doesn’t mess up with your head.”</p><p>He says it like it’s something worth regretting.</p><p>They part in the garden, taking turns to climb back over the gate and disappear down the street. Magnus goes first, then Cornelius.</p><p>“I’ll have trouble staying awake at work today,” the Lieutenant says.</p><p>Office job, Thomas assumes. Maybe something in a bank. </p><p>“Yeah,” he smiles. “Me too. It was worth it, though, wasn’t it? Seeing this place, until the world catches up with it.”</p><p>The Lieutenant gives him a thoughtful look.</p><p>“I’ve always been drawn to ruined places,” he says. “It’s not about… It’s not really about the aesthetics of it. I think it’s the idea of exploration. We’re not going new places, but these old places, we’re making them new... Looking at them with new eyes. Isn’t this what you do with your pictures? You discover places people thought would just vanish, or that people don’t care about.”</p><p>Thomas could kiss him then - he does consider it, now that it’s finally the two of them and the Lieutenant’s final tirade has brought home the fact that he’s not just obsessed with the way the Lieutenant’s profile (the straight nose, the depreciative mouth) translates to a photograph. It wouldn’t be the first time he makes a move on a fellow infiltrator, though such overtures rarely lead to anything. They serve to release tension, and at the end of the day, both parties move on and won’t talk about it again so it doesn’t compromise future explorations. The local urbex community is well versed in moving ever onwards, whether it’s underground, above ground or in the relationships between its members. But he’s not entirely sure what the Lieutenant wants; not even now that they’ve headed out together a few times, and circled each other in the dark, and talked in what Thomas assumes was confidence. Briefly, he thinks the Lieutenant himself will lean in, but his determined expression vanishes as soon as it had appeared.</p><p>“I should go home,” he sighs. “If I want to catch my girlfriend before work.”</p><p>Thomas takes a reflexive step back. There are so many things you can read wrong, going by the faint halo of a torch.</p><p>(And yet - so many things people allow themselves to reveal, too, undercover of night, and he’s always been good at reading people, about as good as he is at capturing the wildness and the echoing loneliness of empty buildings within the frame of his camera.)</p><p>At the top of the fence, the Lieutenant comes to a momentary halt, holding on to the spikes with both hands as he looks down to where Thomas is still waiting in the overgrown garden.</p><p>“If you’re free next month, I know a place we could go to,” he says.</p>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. the manor</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I brought you something.” Thomas carefully extricates the envelope from his bag and hands it over to the Lieutenant. </p><p><em> Army? </em>he wonders, not for the first time. In spite of what the moniker should imply he never quite saw it in the man, but there’s something in the way the Lieutenant accepts the envelope, as if he were receiving an assignment from a superior. Not a man used to receiving gifts, it would seem.</p><p>The Lieutenant pulls out the picture and smiles.</p><p>“I didn’t notice you taking this.”</p><p>“I was worried it wouldn’t turn out well, given how little light there was, but I quite like it.”</p><p>Though the Lieutenant is in the picture, the main focus is on the calendar on the wall, the woman baring her breasts for the camera under the neon-pink date, <em> February 1999. </em> The Lieutenant is angling his torch towards the calendar, and some of the light warms the side of his face. One can almost make out his bemused expression.</p><p>“I’ll treasure it,” the Lieutenant says, as he slips the envelope into his backpack. “Thank you. How have you been doing? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look tired.”</p><p>“It’s been a long day at work.” Thomas adjusts his backpack strap as he gives himself a second to reconsider before he forges on, “At the cafe. There was some sort of pottery festival in my neighbourhood and a lot of it spilled into the cafe where I work. It’s not… It was never what I expected to do with my life. But it is what it is, I suppose. What about you, how was your day?”</p><p>As he speaks he can see the various bits and pieces of information register on the Lieutenant’s face, curiosity and surprise, sympathy and a hint of wariness.</p><p>“Long, yeah.” He looks away towards the alley of trees. “I’ve never been very good at being… authoritative with people, and today I was put into several situations where I had to raise my voice. I don’t think it went very well. My instinct is always to… shut up and glower.”</p><p>“You might be underestimating the power of a good glare. I thought you carried quite a lot of authority when we met, from your posture and appearance alone. Silence can be its own language when you wield it the right way, no?”</p><p>The Lieutenant stares at him.</p><p>“Thank you,” he ventures, after a beat. “I’d just never thought of it that way.”</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p>When Thomas was still a noob, one of the uninitiated, lurking on forums as he tried to get the lay of the land, he’d been passed on an unofficial set of rules, the first of which read as follows:</p><ol>
<li><em>Don’t damage anything upon entry or during your visit (as long as you’re only trespassing, it’s a breach of civil law, not criminal law)</em></li>
<li><em>Don’t take anything away with you (as the saying goes: take only photographs, leave only footprints)</em></li>
</ol><p>The other rules (<em>Remember to recce, Share what you found with the community)</em> have always been subject to debate, but Thomas has yet to encounter an explorer who doesn’t follow the first two.</p><p>“You’ve got a good eye,” he tells the Lieutenant, after they’ve scaled the veranda at the back of the house, and the Lieutenant has managed to open a window with some careful manoeuvering of the old wooden frame.</p><p>“For buildings?” the Lieutenant says, with a fleeting grin. He’s begun to smile more often; Thomas wants to think he’d have noticed even if he wasn’t paying such close attention to every shift in the man’s mood.</p><p>“For buildings,” Thomas acquiesces, looking at the turrets above them. “For access routes.” He follows the Lieutenant inside, dropping soundlessly to the ground, and turns back to study the window they went through by the light of his headlamp. “A good eye for the warped frame of windows that won’t stay shut.”</p><p>“I need to be careful,” the Lieutenant notes wryly. “One of these days you’ll figure me out. Shall I give you the tour?”</p><p>“Please.”</p><p>“The house was built in the 1880s, for the third daughter of a count who’d recently married a rich entrepreneur.” </p><p>The Lieutenant guides Thomas onto the landing, where a staircase plummets down into the dark. The glass roof above the staircase glows a dark blue in the moonlight, as does the large stained glass window on the landing below. Thomas’ headlamp glides over rows of books on shelves all around the landing, a rolled up carpet on the floor, the frail figure of a girl holding the globe of a lamp at the top of the stair. The Lieutenant touches her sculpted hair.</p><p>“The woodwork is exquisite. They had an architect from London draw everything, some aesthete, art for art’s sake and the like, but the girl who ordered the house hired local craftsmen, people who’d never seen that kind of architecture before. They did a masterful job of it. Elegant and fanciful. The house stayed in the same family ever since, virtually untouched. The last owner died two months ago, leaving it and most of its furniture to the town - the council has no idea what to do with it, it’s too out of the way to be worth the upkeep, and there’s quite a bit of work to be done to fix the roofs, and then the floors, the walls… You can’t quite see it by night, but water has got everywhere. The old lady didn’t mind, or maybe she didn’t notice.”</p><p>He pulls a book out of a shelf, only far enough that Thomas may see the crinkled pages. </p><p>“The entire house is going to rot and preventing that would cost money the local preservationists don’t have. I figured you could take pictures? Before it moves on to the next stage of its decomposition.”</p><p>In answer, Thomas uncaps the lense of his camera, and they begin to wander through the house. From up close, it’s easy to see what the Lieutenant was talking about. The wallpaper is dark in most rooms, colours he can’t make out that could be navy blue or a deep purple or a forest green, but it’s also stained in places, curling away, rising as if under the pressure of an invisible hand. There are vases full of wilted flowers on the mantelpieces and dark portraits on the wall, the yellowed varnish blurring the sitters’ features together until they all look the same, rigid figures with pinched faces. A teacup is set upside down on a rack in the kitchen, as if it has only just been rinsed. Moths take flight around a curtain when Thomas pulls it aside to peer at a four-poster bed. And in places, dark rectangles on the walls where pictures used to be; a side-table stripped clear of its knick-knacks even though their shape remains visible in the dust. Moved or stolen or sold.</p><p>“I’m surprised no burglars have come here to pillage the place,” Thomas remarks, snapping a picture of a book sitting open in a tray in the veranda, the tray full of rainwater from a leak in the glass roof, dead leaves floating around the water-logged pages. “It’s a good thing we got there before they did... and that we didn’t run into each other.”</p><p>“Did anything like that ever happen to you?”</p><p>Thomas nods. “Yeah, once. Metal thieves. There was asbestos in the air and we were all wearing respiratory masks, us and the thieves… We left as quickly as we could.”</p><p>The Lieutenant is staring at him.</p><p>“Does anything ever rattle you? Or is it that you don’t show it? You must have been doing this for a long time.”</p><p>“The exploration, or bottling up my feelings?” Thomas huffs. “Forever, in some ways. I liked abandoned places as a kid. Places that were out of bounds.”</p><p>Peering into a darkened bedroom, he shines the beam of his headlamp onto a picture of a banquet, the blushing bride in her wedding finery being presented to the eager guests who appraise her with hungry eyes. Thomas steps towards the painting, wanting to figure out the colours, how the painting could be doused in gold (the rich brocade of the clothing, the walls, the light) and yet so easy to read, it must be the light, the light falling on the top of their heads, outlining a profile. <em> Run, </em>he thinks, looking at the girl, but she wouldn’t go far, not with the heavy architecture of that dress. </p><p>“How is your girlfriend?” he asks, without turning around.</p><p>“What is your opinion on relationships?” the Lieutenant wonders, stepping closer. “That two people should share everything? Or at least, the most important things?”</p><p>Thomas flounders.</p><p>“Well, I…”</p><p>“This is the most important for me. These excursions. The fact that I can’t tell her about that… It means something, although I’m not sure I’m ready to think about it just yet. It can be easier to say things in the dark, right? No one will see you grimace afterwards. There is the life I have up there, the life my family made for me, the job and the corresponding girlfriend, a woman who knows her way around a business luncheon. Tennis on the weekends, sex on a schedule. You asked how she’s doing? Fine, I guess. What about you? Do people know about your explorations?”</p><p>Thomas shakes his head.</p><p>“Better safe than sorry,” he says, precisely as he takes a casual step sideways, and his foot goes through the floor.</p><p>He thinks he hears the Lieutenant cry out, somewhere beyond the ruckus of plaster and rotten wood tearing away and falling onto the floor of the room below. By the time Thomas has gathered his wits, he's sunk halfway through the floorboards, his legs dangling in the air as the broken boards he’s holding onto begin to sag menacingly.</p><p>“Don’t move,” the Lieutenant warns him.</p><p>“I wasn’t going to,” Thomas says, keeping his voice level as if it might upset the floor further. “How far down is the floor of the room under this one?”</p><p>“Far.” Standing against the wall, as far from the hole as he can, the Lieutenant doesn’t sound half as composed as Thomas. “And there’d be a risk of you falling through the floor of that room and straight down to the kitchen. Just… stay still. I’ll try to find something to pull you out of here.”</p><p>Once the Lieutenant has vanished, Thomas has ample time to consider his predicament. He knew the risks, of course, all of them do. What happened to Cornelius’ friend Billy confirmed it: none of them are immune to danger, no matter how dauntless they might feel at times, walking along the tightrope of a bridge’s cables or of an abandoned building’s rafters. Exploration is like mountain climbing, Tom had told Thomas once; you don’t head out to climb a mountain that’s too difficult for you, and you’d better make sure to climb it with someone you trust.</p><p>The house has become silent save for the occasional, distant scurrying, and the disturbing creaking of the boards Thomas is holding onto, trying to keep his lower body as still as possible. Maybe the Lieutenant has left. Thomas has heard of a guy this happened to, who fell down a ladder after one of the rungs gave out, and who stayed stuck in a cellar for two days before his friends came back to get him. Exploring abandoned buildings, one does run the risk of being similarly abandoned. It’s been a while since Thomas had a family to return to, his brother having long moved away, not merely to another country but to the other side of the world, as if he had to put as much distance as he could between himself and the memory of their mother’s sickbed. And Thomas, well, until now he’d got rather used to being on his own. The thought of dying like this, however, broken-legged on the floor of a rotting old house with only the prospect of moths and mice and maybe a burglar for company - it’s singularly unappealing.</p><p>If the Lieutenant returns, Thomas decides, he’ll ask for his name. If he makes it out of here alive and standing on his own two legs, he’ll -</p><p>“Thomas, here. Hold on to this, I’ll pull you out.”</p><p>
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</p><p>As it turns out, by the time he gets out and for maybe an hour afterwards, he’s unable to speak.</p><p>Maybe he’ll just have to keep wondering about it. It could be Henry, or William or Edmund, something a little old-fashioned, old money but of the sort that has become cobwebbed and dusty. Maybe the Lieutenant has such an instinct for these places because he grew up inside one.</p><p>
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</p><p>Before they part ways they stumble into the nearest pub, a little village inn filled to capacity because it’s taken in the excess of guests from a nearby wedding venue. Thomas’ jeans are still white with plaster, his leg shaking slightly under the table as he takes a tentative gulp of his beer, but he counts himself lucky to be otherwise unharmed. After the silence of the house, the way the empty air had seemed to pull at his legs as he clutched the floorboards hard enough that he still has splinters in his hands, the noise of the pub is a comfort.</p><p>“Thank you,” he shouts above the music and the loud cheering at the next table over. “For a moment there, I thought maybe you weren’t coming back.”</p><p>The Lieutenant gives this thought far more consideration than it deserves. </p><p>“I think it’s easy, when we do this, to pretend that we’re someone we’re not,” he shouts back. “And then... something terrible happens, and you realise your recklessness put someone in danger.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“I knew this house wasn’t structurally sound! This is my fault.”</p><p>“We both made it, didn’t we?” Thomas clinks his glass against the Lieutenant’s. “To old manors! Those that still keep a dumb waiter with a rope attached!”</p><p>“To old manors,” the Lieutenant agrees. “And useful ropes.”</p><p>
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</p><p>He couldn’t say why he says it. Maybe it’s the dreary prospect of a long day spent serving lattes to harried lawyers and yoga instructors (the backbone of their neighbourhood it would seem, with at least a couple instances of the lawyers being yoga instructors).</p><p>“I explored an empty manor last night.”</p><p>Armitage’s boyfriend has already left for work, having spent thirty seconds drinking his coffee and thirty minutes complaining about his job, the lack of recognition, the insufficient pay, the architect’s reluctance to engage in any kind of “constructive debate, or even just basic conversation, what a prick.” Armitage is keeping an eye on the door for their boss or a potential patron as he folds paper napkins into flowers.</p><p>“The floor was so rotten I almost fell through, I got stuck with my legs just… dangling through the ceiling of the room below. But it’s a beautiful house... Do you want to see pictures?”</p><p>Armitage pushes away from the counter and comes to lean over Thomas’ phone.</p><p>“Do you go often?”</p><p>“Whenever I can, although with the research you have to pour into prepping for the visit… Sometimes it’s months until I can go again.”</p><p>Armitage swipes through the pictures Thomas had uploaded onto his phone, eerie greenish shots of the house as if it had been underwater.</p><p>“Do you think I could come sometime?”</p><p>Thomas looks at him in surprise, but is spared from answering by his phone chiming with two new DMs.</p><p>“Go ahead,” Armitage shrugs, and he goes off to draw on the menu board, once again sullen and withdrawn, as if this conversation had never happened.</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><em> The house burned down</em>, states the Lieutenant’s laconic message. </p><p>Thomas eventually thinks to google the name of the manor and does indeed discover a slew of news reports about a fire at the house. While the journalists don’t know yet how much of the manor has been lost, the pictures speak for themselves, showing the smoke billowing out of the windows on every floor, and through the hole where the roof has fallen in.</p><p>Thomas’ first, involuntary thought is for the Lieutenant’s cigarettes, although he can’t remember seeing him smoke while they were at the house - not until they’d left, walking side by side on the dark road, elbows brushing, the Lieutenant respecting Thomas’ reluctance to speak.</p><p>He remembers what the Lieutenant had said, about documenting a place before it decomposed any further. How well he’d seemed to know the house. Maybe he’d known the family that lived there.</p><p>There’s been some appeal to not knowing much about the man, a sense of mystery, but Thomas wishes he knew a little more. Enough to put any suspicions to rest.</p><p><em> Did they say how it happened? </em> he writes back.</p><p><em> Arson, </em>the Lieutenant replies.</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p>The second message is from Cornelius.</p><p><em> Hey Mary. I was thinking of heading back under. How about you take a break from all that derp coverage, come and get your feet wet? </em> </p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. down and up</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He hasn’t set foot inside a tunnel in at least a year, maybe more. The last time was that storm drain with Cornelius, paddling along in a raft, and before that Tom had taken him to a reservoir once, the mouth of it a circular concrete opening with a thick brim in the middle of a lake, like a well surrounded by water. They’d found three or four feet of water at the bottom too, Thomas lugging his useless tripod around all night because he couldn’t set it up properly, even though they’d come for that specific purpose. He’d promised Tom a hero shot, the sort of backlit, ominous picture that explorers take painstaking care to stage the better to use it as a calling card afterwards, but the only picture he’d managed to take that night was a view of the opening of the reservoir taken from below, with his smartphone, as Tom and him stood knee-deep in brackish water.</p><p>“It’s insane to me that you’ve never been,” Cornelius is saying, as he picks the lock on the metal door leading to the service tunnel. The alley behind them is silent, the sound of the nearby river muted by the rampant foliage. Bramble hangs above the mouth of the cave and the rocks are covered with deep green moss, tall grass and damp ferns sprouting from every crack and crevice. The ground underfoot is muddy, preserving the imprint of their feet all the way to the door. They are about to commit the world’s most conspicuous crime. </p><p>“You did say you used to live in London?” Cornelius glances back at him, mouth pursed in disapproval. “How could you live in London, and not be tempted to go explore the sewers? Granted they’re absolutely rinsed, but it’s still beautiful to see.”</p><p>“I didn’t really know the scene at the time.”</p><p>“Do you know why they were created?”</p><p>Thomas does know. Cornelius already told him this story and he has a fairly good memory, but he’s too polite to point that out, and besides, there’s something about Cornelius’ London stories that intrigues him. They never fail to be performative, self-aggrandising myths destined to consolidate Cornelius’ reputation as an ace explorer. </p><p>Thomas has a strong suspicion that Cornelius might be a consummate liar. </p><p>“They were designed by an engineer called Bazalgette. J-Bizzle to most drainers these days, he’s become quite the legendary figure.” The lock finally gives and Cornelius turns on his headlamp, preceding Thomas inside. They have to step down into the tunnel, yellow-brown water up to their ankles as they work their way around a network of drainage pipes running level with the ground, most of them covered in silt. The walls and ceiling of the tunnel are wrinkled sandstone. “Sewage had become a massive concern in London by 1858, during what they called the Great Stink - the hot summer weather had roasted all the waste on the banks of the Thames, human and industrial… and there’d been one too many epidemics of cholera and the like, and Parliament decided enough was enough. So they got Bazalgette to design some thousand miles of sewers. One of the great architectural feats of the Victorian era... This has its charm,” Cornelius says, tapping his hand against the rough-hewn rock, “but the London sewers… It’s all curving tunnels of brick. A maze and a monument. Here, we’re going left.”</p><p>Thomas had looked over a map of the tunnels that Cornelius had sent him, although it was incomplete, limited to those tunnels Cornelius had visited on previous occasions. <em> I’m hoping we’ll be able to check out tunnels I haven’t explored before, the weather helping, </em> Cornelius had written to him beforehand. <em> Last time a lot of them were flooded.  </em></p><p>Cornelius had told him wellies should be enough, but by now the brown water is slapping against his thighs and Thomas is glad he’d decided to wear waders instead. Waders and a helmet. The baseline when it comes to Cornelius is that you will most likely have a good time with him if you disregard most of what he’s saying.</p><p>Those tunnels are a strange place, man-made but looking as if they could have been bored by the water as it eroded the rock over millions of years. They might as well have gone caving.</p><p>“So this used to be a mine?”</p><p>“The drainage tunnels for the mine, yeah,” Cornelius answers from up ahead. “Coal Authority closed these down in the 90s. They used to draw in water from the canal to power a wheel, and after that the water from the wheel and the water pumped from the mine left through a tailrace tunnel... We should run into it later on, I’m curious to see if we could follow it part of the way back to the wheel - the wheel’s underwater nowadays, so eventually we’ll get stuck, but there’s already a lot less water now than there was last time. I haven’t explored all of these yet,” Cornelius adds, gesturing towards a narrower tunnel branching out from the one they’ve been following, and which appears to be sloping down sharply after a few feet. </p><p>“I hope we won’t have to crawl through anything.”</p><p>“Have you ever been to the sewers under the town?” Cornelius asks. Though Thomas can’t see much more than the back of him shifting in and out of the beam of his headlamp, he can tell that Cornelius is smiling.</p><p>“No, I haven’t.”</p><p>“They’re small, and by small I mean at most they reach what, three feet in height?”</p><p>“I hope the pay-off was worth it, if you had to crawl through miles of raw sewage.”</p><p>Cornelius snorts.</p><p>“Billy was always taller than the tunnels we went into. He was what, 6’3? Oh, he had a real affinity for draining, I think because he was a discrete guy and it doesn’t get any more discrete than this, does it? But wherever we went, he kept knocking his head.”</p><p>For a while after that, the only sound comes from the water sloshing around their legs. Thomas isn’t sure if he’s supposed to pick up this thread of their conversation, or to change the subject. Cornelius is full of glorious stories of climbing up the side of tall buildings until London has been reduced to a glittering map far below his feet; he’s never been one for sentimentality or personal anecdotes. Indeed he must be having second thoughts about mentioning Billy, for when he speaks again, it’s in his usual, slightly obsequious tone.</p><p>“Your friend the Lieutenant, he’s not like the rest of us, is he?”</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>It seems pointless to argue that Thomas barely knows the Lieutenant, and as such would hesitate to call him a friend. In fact, he does have a number of explorer friends whose real lives he knows nothing about. None of them ever saved his life by pulling him through a rotten floor with the rope from a dumb waiter. His reluctance to consider the Lieutenant a friend stems from far murkier reasons that he’s not about to discuss in some underground tunnel, knee-deep in stagnant water, and with Cornelius of all people.</p><p>“I think this is the real world for a lot of us, right?” Cornelius gestures at the tunnel. He doesn’t need to hold his arms out straight to touch the walls on both sides. “But for him, it’s a form of escapism. We have day jobs that we don’t identify with, routines we need to break. He’s something else. He has money, for one. Who else would have shown up in a designer hoodie to explore an abandoned factory?”</p><p>“A designer hoodie?” Thomas’ laugh echoes through the tunnel. “Is that even a thing? And how could you even tell, it was the middle of the night.”</p><p>“The jeans too,” Cornelius insists. “Which tells me he’s the sort of guy who’s probably rich enough that he’s never had to dress down.”</p><p>“It doesn’t matter, does it? You wouldn’t want me to know what you do the rest of the time. It’s not part of your adventurer persona. Why does it matter who he is?”</p><p>“Why do you like him so much?” Cornelius is speaking too fast, which makes it hard to tell if he’s being bitter or just petty. “There’s an edge to you that I don’t see in him. All in all he’s quite dull, isn’t he?”</p><p>“Discretion doesn’t necessarily mean dullness, you should know that.”</p><p>Thomas makes use of a ledge in the wall of the tunnel to set down his bag and retrieve his DSLR camera, wondering if he’s overstepped. Cornelius was needling him, but Cornelius is obviously trying to process some sort of grief with this outing and Thomas is starting to suspect he might not have been asked here on a whim, but because Cornelius is trying to find a replacement for Billy. It’s beyond Thomas why Cornelius should have chosen him rather than any of the people he actually gets along with, Magnus or that snotty guy Charlie that Thomas had met the one time they’d done a meet-up, when they’d set up a projector in the quarries to show some horror film about a caving expedition gone wrong.</p><p>“We’re quite similar, aren’t we?” Cornelius remarks.</p><p>Not the sort of thing one wants to hear in such surroundings, when the light glances over the pale green water lapping at the ceiling of a submerged side tunnel and the rocks overhead glisten where the roof of the main tunnel slopes gradually downwards, the water around their thighs becoming murkier, from a diluted bluish-green to a coppery brown. Thomas adjusts his helmet as his head begins to rasp against the ceiling.</p><p>“Are we?”</p><p>The brown sludge now rises to Thomas’ chest, and once again he’s grateful that he didn’t listen to Cornelius (“a pair of wellies and you could just do this in jeans”). At least it’s ochre and mud rather than sewage, so the smell is earthy, far preferable to the rotten egg smell one encounters in sewers. If Cornelius is to be believed, the stink of the sewers can get even worse in places, “more like rotting flesh, when you’re close to restaurants and they just dump their grease and fat down there without giving a damn where it ends up.”</p><p>“I get why those places fascinate you,” Thomas says. “In some ways, it’s exploration for exploration’s sake, mapping out terrain rather than looking for a specific sight... and I don’t dislike doing this with you, but it’s more of a, ah, a sort of curiosity. I’m into it because you’re into it, if that makes sense? So no, I don’t think we’re all that similar. I think we come from similar backgrounds - working class London, yeah? Council estates, parents who have their own shit to deal with. Jobs that don’t pay. Moving here for a fresh start. But that doesn’t make us the same person, does it?”</p><p>Cornelius glances back at him over his shoulder, pale blue eyes blinking in the light from Thomas’ lamp, “You always have to set yourself apart, don’t you?”</p><p>“From you? I do,” Thomas says, more honest maybe than he intended to be. “I’ve known men like you. I’ve loved some of them. Born manipulators… We’re not similar, Cornelius. I think in some ways we’re as different as we could be.”</p><p>“Here’s the junction,” Cornelius notes, as they make their way into a large chamber, ochre glistening on the walls, with a sealed shaft above and the start of another tunnel up ahead, blocked by a mass of ochre and mud and gravel. “That’s our stop,” he shrugs. “The wheel pit is probably up ahead, somewhere. It’s an eerie thought, right? We’re here, and on the other side of that pile of mud it’s tons of water pushing back, waiting to drown us.” </p><p>The 4 Gas meter at his side has been emitting a steady beep ever since they walked into the chamber.</p><p>“Low oxygen,” Cornelius remarks.</p><p>“Time to back out, then.”</p><p>“What if I tell you,” Cornelius says, slowly as if the lack of oxygen has already started to get to him - or as if he needs to weigh his words - “that I was with Billy, when it happened?”</p><p>“Were you?”</p><p>Cornelius meets Thomas’ gaze and grins.</p><p>“No.” He angles his lamp downwards at the ocean of mud surrounding them, his smile vacillating, a dying lightbulb. “But I keep thinking, what if I had been? It would have messed me up. Something like that, it’s gotta mess you up.”</p><p>“Cornelius. We need to go.”</p><p>Thomas takes a cautious step towards the entrance of the chamber, wondering what he’ll do if Cornelius doesn’t follow him. In some ways, he’d accepted a responsibility for Cornelius’ well-being when he followed him here, even if at the end of the day, urban exploration tends to favour an everyone-for-themselves mentality. They must have walked through a couple miles of tunnels to get here. If he has to drag Cornelius back to the exit, including through those recent junctions where they were all but swimming through dense mud…</p><p>“Sometimes I wish all the tunnels would flood,” Cornelius says dispassionately. “And all the houses would burn down... Then we’d be the last people to have ever seen them… I don’t know what you look for with your pictures. You and your ruin porn,” he scoffs. “I’m interested in the moment when things vanish. When the light goes out.”</p><p>“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Thomas insists, and this time, when he walks through the door of the chamber, Cornelius follows him.</p><p>Thomas is in such a hurry to see the light again that he retraces their steps in a rush, Cornelius calling him back sometimes, “No, no that way,” “You really want to drown, don’t you?”, and “That’s a dead end.” Thomas bites back a retort each time, more than aware that he put himself in this situation where it’s either listening to Cornelius or getting lost.</p><p>When they do finally step out of the tunnels, the sun has long gone down and the cloudy sky is pitch black. Thomas scrambles to remove his helmet and suit and takes off towards his car, stumbling over the rocks of the overgrown path, Cornelius close on his heels.</p><p>“Scared you, didn’t I? I didn’t mean to. That kind of place, it gets to your head. No hard feelings?”</p><p>Thomas shakes his muddy hand.</p><p>“This was the last time,” he says.</p><p>“Not much of a drainer, are you?”</p><p>“I knew what I was getting myself into,” he says, because contrary to Cornelius, he’s never been one for lies - and because somewhere in there, Cornelius did tell him the truth, disquieting as it might have been. “But I won’t trust you with an exploration again. You’ll just have to ask someone else.”</p><p>As he drives back towards the town, the suit and helmet bundled up in the boot, he keeps thinking, <em> I wanted to be scared. I went with him because I wanted that edge of not knowing what would happen. </em>And it doesn’t matter that he’ll never do this again; it’s unsettling enough to know that this time at least, he’d wanted it. </p><p>Heading into a tunnel, not knowing if he’d ever get out.</p><p>
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</p><p>By the time he gets home and showers the ochre out of his hair, it’s going on midnight. In the morning he’ll have to be at work and at least moderately alert but he can tell he won’t be able to sleep until then. He isn’t too sure what to do with the leftover adrenaline, debates going for a run and messages the Lieutenant instead.</p><p>
  <em> In case you happen to be around, I’m going for a walk in the town centre, and if I get the chance to explore something, I’ll take it. </em>
</p><p>He didn’t really expect the Lieutenant to answer, let alone minutes later.</p><p>
  <em> Where and when? </em>
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</p><p> </p><p>The Lieutenant arrives late at their meeting point and begins his apology before he’s even within Thomas’ hearing range, something about how he tried to leave earlier but couldn’t, and he concludes as he reaches Thomas with, “I was in the middle of breaking up.”</p><p>Thomas is unsure how to react to this information, can’t tell if the Lieutenant needs him to be reassuring or supportive or curious, although he has a feeling he already knows what happened, because the Lieutenant seems like the sort of man who’d just head off at one in the morning and refuse to say where he’s going. In the end he settles for, “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“Don’t be. Where are we going?”</p><p>“We can do this some other night if…”</p><p>“I didn’t sleepwalk here,” the Lieutenant informs him. “I wanted to come. Shall we?”</p><p>Thomas looks around to make sure the street is empty, and indicates the fence blocking the entrance to a construction site. “After you.”</p><p>The Lieutenant gives him a puzzled look.</p><p>“What, you want to go inside?” He pulls a face at the buildings, most of which aren’t finished yet, large steel carcasses waiting to be filled with concrete. “There won’t be much to see.”</p><p>“Are you afraid of heights?”</p><p>The Lieutenant’s eyes widen. He looks up, above the buildings and towards the two cranes towering above them, and then back at Thomas, with something else in his gaze now, a flicker of interest.</p><p>“No. But there’ll be CCTV cameras and who knows what else. Security guards.”</p><p>“We’ll just have to be careful then,” Thomas shrugs, reluctant to consider what has him behaving like this, with the sort of daring Tom or Cornelius might exhibit but that he’d never wanted to acknowledge in himself.</p><p>Something about wanting to get out of that cave - to get as far from it as he can.</p><p>The Lieutenant has some trouble scaling the fence, starting over a few times until Thomas gives him a leg up. Once they’re inside however, his hesitation disappears, and he precedes Thomas through the site, as if he were eager to prove this initial struggle had been a one-off. He has an unerring eye for cameras, pulling Thomas aside a few times to avoid their line of sight, going around containers or sticking to the shadows on the ground floor of the nearest building, bending low to run towards the bottom of the tallest crane.</p><p>“You’re lucky they left it so exposed,” he remarks. “These days it’s not rare to find a cage around the base. At the very least the hatch is usually locked.” He looks up the ladder as he pulls off his gloves. “The camera at the corner of the portacabin over there might catch us on the way up.”</p><p>“If you’d rather not go…” Thomas says, because it must be said, and he’ll make his peace with it if the Lieutenant has changed his mind, even though it has been exhilarating to watch him take charge of the exploration, as if he’d converted all his usual caution and his quiet curiosity into a brisk sort of efficiency.</p><p>“No, I’m game if you are.”</p><p>The ladder is some fifty or sixty metres long. Thomas has only been up a single crane before, with Tom and Soph, a young woman who’d instigated the whole expedition so she could string up a banner along the arm of the crane that demanded the town stop funding the construction of hotels and start upgrading its social housing. He’d been afraid at the time and he’s afraid now, although it’s the sort of fear that spurs you forward, not the sort that makes you balk. Every rung on the ladder pulls him out and away from the mud in the cave, up and above the tedium of work at the cafe, the strange loneliness of a town that had once been teeming with life - smoke billowing out of chimney stacks, workers walking home, Thomas’ uncles among them, - now it’s only tall, empty buildings, the wind rushing by, the distant sound of passing cars and the occasional siren, the constellation of stars above and the constellation of city lights below, and the soles of the Lieutenant’s boots a few rungs higher, where he’s climbing at a slow but steady pace. They barely pause on the platforms they pass along the way, only long enough to catch their breath before they start moving again. Neither of them says it but they’re both wary of the cameras they’d seen down on the site, of this whole outing ending in a sprint away from the cops.</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p>“Did it help?” the Lieutenant asks, when they’re sitting on the platform next to the locked cabin at the top, feet hanging above the void. The crane sways gently in the wind. Thomas is reminded of ski lifts, of the gondolas on a Ferris wheel, when everything comes to a swinging halt, letting you believe for a moment that you might come crashing down.</p><p>“Did what help?”</p><p>“This,” the Lieutenant says, pulling out his cigarettes as if they weren’t hovering on a ledge two hundred feet above the town. “How are you feeling?”</p><p>“Like it’s a long way down?” Thomas carefully extracts his camera from his bag and takes a few pictures of the slumbering city, of the pale blue dawn on the horizon and of the Lieutenant’s serious profile. He’s thrown back his hood and his dark hair sticks up in every direction; it makes him look younger, even with the dark stubble on his cheeks.</p><p>“Let me take one,” the Lieutenant decides, sticking his cigarette at the corner of his mouth to take the DSLR from Thomas’ hands. “Your hero shot.”</p><p>(It is fitting, Thomas will think later, as he uploads the picture on his laptop, that his hero shot should be, not a picture of his feet precariously placed on one of the criss-crossing beams of the crane, but one where he leans tired and pensive against one of the beams that framed the platform, smiling at the night or at the empty air, his arms crossed against the cold.)</p><p>“That’s the abattoirs over there,” the Lieutenant remarks, pointing at the pale brown rectangle of a roof that’s only large compared to the roofs that surround it. “And the theatre, along the boulevard down there, with the town hall at the other end… And the smelting plant, of course. With all those unlit areas around it, a proper no man’s land… And the train station… The hotels.”</p><p>“Can you imagine going to all these places? After hours, I mean. Dancing with the statues on the theatre balcony. Sneaking into that Victorian salon at the train station that hasn’t changed at all since the station was built, but that no traveller ever gets to see... Scaling the roof of the abattoirs - we’d need an SRT kit for that, it’s not as high as this but it’s another kind of tricky…”</p><p>“I might not get to accompany you after tonight.” The Lieutenant puts out his cigarette on the platform. In the distance, the sun has begun to rise. “I like this, but professionally, it’s...another kind of tricky, as you put it.”</p><p>“Army?” Thomas asks at last, after having wondered about it for months.</p><p>The Lieutenant snorts.</p><p>“No. My brother is in the army. The rest of us followed in our father’s footsteps. I’ve always admired him for that, breaking the mould, even if it means we go months without any news sometimes. Coming on these expeditions, I was trying to channel some of his… spirit of initiative.”</p><p>“I’ll miss this,” Thomas admits. “We have a good… rapport.”</p><p>“Is this what we’re calling it?”</p><p>At first Thomas thinks he’s being mocked, but the Lieutenant’s expression is wistful. Thomas raps his fingers against the platform.</p><p>“What should we be calling it?”</p><p>“Up here? A side effect of the adrenaline. Down there…”</p><p>“Let’s go down then,” Thomas decides. “Let’s figure it out.”</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The way Thomas sees it, it hasn’t been a long night so much as a succession of nights. </p><p>A first night wading through mud in Cornelius’ company like some modern retelling of Dante and Virgil’s visit to Hell (if Dante and Virgil had become stuck in a quagmire soon after they’d passed the sign telling them to <em> Abandon all hope</em>, that is). </p><p>A second night to steal through a construction site and climb high above the town, just for the sake of it, or maybe to impress a man whose features he could redraw from memory, even though he doesn’t know his name, whose perseverance and thoughtful curiosity he admires although he doesn’t know the first thing about his life outside of these excursions. </p><p>A third night during which he walks fast back to his car because it’s closer than his flat and he isn’t really used to doing these things any other way. Breathing rushed against one another’s necks as they bring each other off in the backseat, scratching their hands on the zippers of their jeans, the Lieutenant gripping the back of Thomas’ black jumper, Thomas gripping the Lieutenant’s hair, begging him to “Give me a name, even a fake one, I just need something to call you,” and the Lieutenant shudders it against his mouth, “Edward... my name’s Edward.”</p><p>A fourth and final night when it’s already morning, the light slipping in through a shutter he hadn’t properly closed, Edward face down on the bed, eyes shut against his arm as Thomas fucks him slowly, taking his time now that it’s clear neither of them is going to vanish with the daybreak. Learning to reconcile his idea of the Lieutenant, slender figure in dark-clothing, austere fantasy without much corporeality, with Edward’s body (the well-defined muscles in the arm clutching the pillow, the warm slope of his back and jut of his hips and long lines of his legs), with what Edward wants (Thomas’ mouth on him) and likes (Thomas’ hand on his hip to guide him as he meets Thomas’ thrusts; to be silent but for a rare, startled gasp, to be silent so he can hear Thomas speak, murmurs of praise and wonder as Thomas forgets every night that came before this one, everything but Edward’s name, which he breathes out sharply in the hollow of Edward’s neck, as if he’d had the care of it for a while and must now return it to its owner, imbued with new memories and meaning).</p><p>
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</p><p>They have coffee in Thomas’ small kitchen, crowded against each other next to the open window, the cries of children drifting in from the nearby school. Thomas is late for work and Edward must be late as well, though Thomas isn’t sure where he expects to go, unshaved and with his hair damp from a shower, wearing the black jeans and t-shirt and hoodie he’d worn to scale a crane.</p><p>“I need to sort things out,” Edward says, though he reconsiders his words at once and elaborates, “I need to move out from my flat, the lease is in my… in my ex-girlfriend’s name. Work has been hectic lately... I might need time before I can… Unless this was just…”</p><p>“It wasn’t just,” Thomas reassures him. That much he knows, and if the rest is uncertain, he’s done uncertain before. He’s lock-picked it and swum through it and free-climbed it. Why should this be any different? A place to access, somehow, when he’ll have a better grasp of its history, once he’ll have mapped out the entry points, the security.</p><p>“My number,” Edward says, sliding it on a piece of paper across the table. “Can I have yours? I’d like to see where this takes us. This… good rapport of ours.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. the summer camp</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s more of a meet-up than an exploration. In fact, Thomas has been here on several occasions before, often with Tom, on crisp evenings like this when summer melds into autumn. </p><p>“This place was stuck in development hell for years,” Tom explains to Armitage, who’d introduced himself as Tommy once he’d understood there were already two Thomases in attendance. He hadn’t seemed half as annoyed by it as Thomas would have expected. “It was a summer camp for almost forty years. Then they closed it down and it stayed closed for… Twelve years, at least? They’ll be here next week to tear down the buildings.”</p><p>The buildings in question are two rectangles of brick with flat roofs, where they’ve located big empty kitchens and several dormitories complete with iron bed frames. Beyond the buildings, the camp comprises a series of cabins scattered near the edge of the woods, a pier off the side of an artificial lake, and the remains of a treetop adventure course. </p><p>“We’re here for a send-off,” Tom concludes. “We’ll drink and eat and Silence...” he nods towards her, “... will create some unforgettable artwork in half an hour on one of the walls, but we won’t be allowed to take pictures of it.”</p><p>“I don’t want my art to be mediatised or to be the object of any sort of trade,” Silence declares, as she extends her hands to catch the beer that Tom tosses her way.</p><p>“What do you paint with?” Armitage asks, and to Thomas’ surprise, his moody colleague relocates closer to Silence as they engage in some intense conversation about spray paint.</p><p>“What about your pictures?” Soph says, taking Armitage’s place at Thomas’ side.</p><p>“What about them?”</p><p>“You still take them, right? I saw the report you made of your visit to the smelting plant. Okay, hear me out. I know these two men who own a gallery, Francis is a dear old friend…”</p><p>Thomas laughs. “You can’t be serious.”</p><p>“... and I showed him some old pictures you took because they’re having this whole series of exhibits next year about memory and the passing of time, and whether photography can preserve the past without damaging it, and they’re interested in your work. You could use a pseudonym if you don’t want to use your real name. But that would be good for you, I think, to get some public recognition…”</p><p>“I thought urban exploration was all about anonymity. Being nameless and genderless, isn’t that how you usually put it?”</p><p>“I said it should be about reshaping our identities,” Soph corrects him, tucking a wisp of blond hair behind her ear. “I think your pictures are very good, and I think Francis and you would get along. He used to go caving when he was younger, and the way he talks about it… You'd like it. He has a sort of dry humour that reminds me of you.”</p><p>Thomas, who’s always admired Soph and her opinionated stance on the ethics of urban exploration, but who’d never have thought he’d made any impression on her, either online or in the flesh, is at a loss how to answer.</p><p>“Thank you,” he ventures quietly.</p><p>She takes a swig of her beer.</p><p>“You can just invite me to the opening of your exhibition.”</p><p>“Speaking of caving…” Tom passes them a bag of crisps and drops down cross-legged on Thomas’ other side. “Did you hear about Cornelius?” </p><p>Thomas thinks of the drainage tunnels, of a river of mud gripping him so tightly it was impossible not to worry - to wonder what would happen if he remained trapped there - and the worry had caused his breathing to quicken as the 4 Gas meter beeped louder and louder.</p><p>“What happened?”</p><p>“He was arrested,” Tom says, as Silence and Armitage glance up from their quiet graffiti talk. “For setting fire to… an abandoned hospital, I think?”</p><p>“Was anybody hurt?” Silence asks.</p><p>“Not that I know.”</p><p>“Jesus,” Soph exclaims. “What’s striking when you do this is that most of the people you meet are actually normal people, you know? And then there’s Cornelius. He always has to be the exception to every rule.”</p><p>“He’s always been a crafty bastard,” Tom says, which has to be the most severe character assessment Thomas has ever heard him pronounce against anybody.</p><p>Thomas feels their eyes on him but he doesn’t know what to say. Looking back on the past few months, it’s difficult not to spy certain patterns - Cornelius’ ability to show up on an expedition he hadn’t been invited to, the manor house burning down, Cornelius saying that maybe he’d been with Billy. Maybe not.</p><p>“Billy’s death did a number on him,” Tom says, ever willing to be kind and understanding.</p><p>Armitage is giving him a quizzical look, so Thomas explains, “Billy was one of us. He drowned last year.”</p><p>“Cornelius was always weird,” Soph remarks. “Billy’s death just brought it to the fore.”</p><p>“Enough sad talk,” Tom decides. “You’re going to scare off the noob. Here, let’s have a toast. Does anyone have any suggestions?”</p><p>“We could drink to Aspairt,” Thomas offers. “As the father of our discipline.”</p><p>Armitage is still watching them carefully, as if he hasn’t decided yet what to make of them and their strange rituals. When Thomas had asked him if he’d like to come along, he’d shrugged and said "Sure", and asked what he should wear, and he’s followed Thomas’ advice to the letter, dressed all in black from his hoodie to his sneakers. With his wild black curls it makes him look like the poster child for teenage rebellion.</p><p>“Who was Aspairt?” he asks. </p><p>“A man who went searching for wine in the limestone quarries under Paris, at some point in the late eighteenth century,” Thomas answers. “They eventually found his body… Some eleven years later. To Aspairt, then! May we not share his fate.”</p><p>“To Aspairt!” the others entone, some of them drinking and some not, and once they’re done they go exploring a little until the sun comes down. In the summer camp’s old common room, Silence spray-paints Soph’s portrait, capturing the solemnity of her blue gaze and the firm set of her mouth, in an artwork that stretches from the gritty floor to the mouldy ceiling.</p><p>Thomas sits on a platform in one of the tall spruce trees, watching as Tom and Silence build a fire so they can cook the sausages and potatoes they brought along. They’re reusing the site of an older fire, adding wood onto a pile of ashes surrounded by a circle of stones. Thomas quite likes the idea of it, this superimposition of fires across time. Cornelius would have found it trite - it is now obvious that Cornelius would rather have kicked aside the stones and given the fire a chance to spread rather than to have to endure watching it being contained - but Thomas wonders what Edward would have thought, Edward who sent him a picture of a crane a few hours ago along with the caption, <em> I don’t think anyone else gets to look at cranes and remember some exceptionally good sex, (un)fortunately for me I walk by this one every morning. </em>Thomas had asked him to come to what he hadn’t called an exploration but a picnic, but Edward had turned him down. Something about a strenuous workload.</p><p>(As Thomas had told Armitage that morning as they sipped their coffee and watched Diggle the cook try to fix the broken frame of the cafe’s front door, there’s only so many times you can ask a guy out before it becomes clear he’s not so much busy as undecided, and it’s only a step from undecided to uninterested.</p><p>“Maybe he<em> is</em> busy,” Armitage had generously pointed out, though he’d said it in the bored tone he used whenever he had to talk about love affairs, whether his own or anyone else’s. “That’s certainly the case with my boyfriend. Work has been mad at the construction site, I haven’t seen him in at least a week. They want to make a big political thing of the opening, it’s a lot of pressure. At least he’s getting along with the architect now, I think they’ve moved past open hatred to doing shots each time they receive a new set of unrealistic deadlines.”)</p><p>“Can I come up?” Armitage asks him now, gazing up at him from the foot of the tree. “I have more booze,” he adds, lifting a bottle of wine for Thomas’ inspection.</p><p>They share it sitting side by side on the platform in an odd echo to the night Thomas and Edward had spent on top of the crane. This time the platform is only twenty feet high, but the view is splendid all the same, of the forest stretching downhill towards where the town flickers with lights.</p><p>“So are we friends now?” Thomas asks.</p><p>“Do you really need to put a name on it?” Armitage says, though there isn’t much bite to it.</p><p>“You seem to get along with Silence,” Thomas tries again.</p><p>“We don’t agree about anything. It’s like we speak two different languages, and yet we use the exact same supplies. She’d tell you she’s an artist and that I do graffiti. I guess she’s not entirely wrong. Do you know that’s how I met Solomon?”</p><p>Thomas raises his eyebrows.</p><p>“What, you were tagging a wall when he showed up?”</p><p>“Yeah. On a building he was working on. He was the last guy on site - he saw me and he just… vaulted over a fence to catch me. I don’t know. I was sixteen, I was pissed at everyone. But I think I’d found the right way to express it. Beats setting houses on fire, doesn’t it?”</p><p>They pass the bottle back and forth as the stars come out and cars streak through the town, and then they clamber down inelegantly to join the others around the fire, where Tom has produced a guitar and Soph is reading out loud out of a book of folk tales.</p><p><em> Do I really need to put a name on it? </em> Thomas wonders, and decides that no, he doesn’t, not on these people or on how they found each other or on whatever they’ve built out of places that society no longer has any use for. Whether it’s friendship or family or something more elusive, it doesn’t really matter.</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. in the daytime</h2></a>
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    <p>In the early morning they pack up the refuse of the night, empty bottles and cans of spray-paint. The only visible traces of their presence as they leave are the charred circle of the fire and Silence’s portrait of Soph on a wall that will come down in a day or two.</p><p>Thomas and Armitage salute the others and make their way to the cafe, because it’s 6 AM and they might as well head there straight away, if only to inhale a few cups of coffee before they open for business. By the time Solomon arrives, Thomas has exhausted most of the new headlines on his news app and has taken to browsing through what pictures of past explorations he’d thought to download on his phone, including a few pictures of Edward he’s been trying to find the nerve to delete, which is why he does a double take when the doorbell rings and Solomon enters, followed by a familiar figure.</p><p>“Hey lads, we got a hard day ahead of us, half the town council’s dropping by to check we haven’t killed the spirit of the place, or whatever, what kind of spirit they want to preserve in an old slaughterhouse is lost on me, but at any rate we could use the coffee. Oh, this is Edward Little. He’s the architect on the project.”</p><p>“We sure have heard a lot about you,” Armitage deadpans.</p><p>Edward, however - woollen-coat-and-navy-blue-tie-Edward, drawn-features, hasn’t-slept-in-a-while-Edward - he smiles tiredly at Thomas, a smile that soon breaks into surprised laughter.</p><p>“And you come here every morning?” he tells Solomon, slapping a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll be damned.”</p><p>As Solomon and Armitage stare at them uncomprehendingly, Thomas begins to laugh as well, hungover and exhausted but decidedly pleased, and for the next half hour, as the others smoke outside and Diggle hums along to whatever pop tune has come up on the tiny radio they keep in the kitchen, Thomas and Edward sit at one of the little tables, their feet touching, without saying much of anything after Edward’s initial suggestion that, “Maybe we should start over, start at the beginning this time, where we come from, how we got here, that sort of thing.” </p><p>Thomas nods and leans in to kiss him, a first time with that feeling of exhilaration that he knows well from having experienced it often, two hundred feet above ground or sixty feet below, and then a second time, with more familiarity already, the sort of happiness that safety brings. Edward is here now, and will be here again. There will be time for stories, confessions, whatever exploration they decide to embark upon next.</p><p>“At the beginning,” Edward insists gently. “Hello, I’m Edward Little. Architect and explorer.”</p><p>“Thomas Jopson. Barista, photographer, explorer... Edward Little, I’m delighted to meet you.”</p>
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